John Spencer (Master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge)

John Spencer (* 1630, † 1693) was an English clergyman and scholar, Master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

Spencer after studying at Cambridge University, first as a preacher in 1667 until his death as a master of Corpus Christi College. As a learned theologian and Hebrew scholar, he was known by his work De legibus Hebraeorum, a pioneer of comparative religion, which also appeared in Tübingen 1732. In it, he further develops the thesis that Judaism was not the first religion of the earliest human history. He built his theories on Maimonides and used for this purpose, the entire known in his time, theological, scientific and other literature of the ancient authors to the Middle Ages, as well as the Bible itself, in order to gain knowledge of ancient Egypt and its importance for Judaism. He went there for the first time entirely with the methods of the Enlightenment before. He was also a pioneer of Egyptology through his rediscovery of the role of Egypt for the biblical tradition and triggered a second wave of enthusiasm Egypt after Marsilio Ficino already by Corpus Hermeticum a first rediscovery of Egypt in Europe was triggered at the end of the 15th century.